Bring Back The New Economy
from the now,-it's-needed dept
An opinion piece in Salon suggests that what the economy needs right now is a government that is willing to bring back the “new economy”. While this might sound crazy, there are a few points that make sense. As we discussed recently, there’s a growing tech gap between what technology the best companies are using, and what everyone else is using. However, in order to fill that gap, the country needs to stimulate innovation – something they’re not doing. The article argues that most politicians (no matter what political party they belong to) don’t realize how helping to pump Silicon Valley back up might help. I’m not convinced of this argument. I do think innovation is important, but I’m not convinced that Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs really need a bunch of government help yet. As has been pointed out many times in the past, some of the strongest companies come out of recessions, because the entrpreneurs need to get creative. I think that we’ve only begun to see the creativity of today’s entrepreneurs – and I think they can still do quite a bit more without government intervention.
Comments on “Bring Back The New Economy”
Super boom now if...
we get over our cultural inhibitions regarding the “sanctity of life”, and start cloning humans, body parts, embryo experiments en masse. If we could start breeding millions of mutant babies without regard for ethics, we’d have a biological revolution overnight.
The IT issue is relatively trivial. If we have any serious long-term disadvantages to India/China/Russia, it is their lack of inhibition concerning abortion or cloning. Abortion is the main method of birth control in most Asian countries, and lacking our Christian sensibilities, have little or no inhibitions regarding cloning or embryo experiments.
So if we want to set the stage for long-term competitiveness, now is a window of opportunity to crack down on the powerful pro-life lobby in the name of “national security”. Otherwise, when there is economic pressure to increase cloning/embryo experiments, we’ll practically go to civil war over the issue.
Broadband
If the government want’s to do something to help, they should invest in “last mile” broadband. This would make all that fiber that was layed get used and cause a trickle down to the rest of the tech industry.